Tobe Hooper, whose low-budget horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is regarded as a classic of the genre.
Photograph: Nocturna International Fantastic Handout/EPA

Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, has died aged 74, the Los Angeles County Coroner has confirmed. The cause of death is not yet known.

A screenwriter and producer as well as a director, Hooper spent much of his career in horror, directing a series of works now considered classics of the genre, including Poltergeist and the TV adaptation of the Stephen King novel Salem’s Lot.

Hooper was born in Austin, Texas in 1943. For much of the 1960s he worked as a university professor and a documentary cameraman. He made his directing debut with Eggshells, a low-budget hippie movie released in 1969.

In 1974 Hooper assembled a group of students and teachers to perform in another low-budget work influenced by the serial killer Ed Gein, concerning a group of friends who are picked off one by one by cannibals. Despite being banned in several countries including the UK for its violent content, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would prove to be enormously successful at the box office, and is now regarded as one of the most influential horror films of all time. The film spawned a number of sequels – the first of which was directed by Hooper – as well as several remakes. A prequel film about lead character Leatherface is due later this year.

The success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre allowed Hooper to work with larger budgets. In 1979 he directed a TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s vampire novel Salem’s Lot, an edited version of which was later released in cinemas in Europe.

After making 1981 slasher film The Funhouse, which was unsuccessfully prosecuted as a video nasty in the UK, Hooper was chosen to direct the supernatural horror Poltergeist, about a family whose home life is disrupted by malevolent spirits. The film was written and produced by by Steven Spielberg, who was unable to direct due to a clause in his contract that prevented him from making another film during the production of ET: The Extra Terrestrial. Despite this, there were reports in the build-up to the film’s release that Spielberg had exerted an influence over its direction. In an attempt to downplay the issue, Spielberg published an open letter to Hooper in the week of the film’s release celebrating the pair’s “unique creative relationship” and praising Hooper’s direction of the film. Poltergeist went on to be a major commercial and critical success, spawning several sequels and a 2015 remake.

Derek Malcolm reviews The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: from the archive, 18 November 1976

Read more

Hooper continued to direct into his later years but was never able to match the success of his early work. His later films included monster movie Crocodile, released in 2000, a 2004 remake of crime drama The Toolbox Murders and the 2005 zombie film Mortuary. Hooper’s final film was 2013 horror Djinn, which was funded by and set in the United Arab Emirates. He is survived by his son.

• This article was amended on 18 September 2017. Hooper is survived by one son, not two as an earlier version said.